Theodore Dalyrymple’s funeral oration for a generation in City Journal needs no amplification. It cannot be improved on. He says what people are now ready to hear: that dependency has a created a generation of cripples. The London riots and the current ongoing financial collapse have made it possible to say what was previously verboten: that rather than attaining the End of History the Welfare State has reached the End of the Line.
The $64 trillion question is what do we do about it? But first let us have a look at what Dalyrymple says about the state of our ruined human capital.
The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.
At the same time, his expensive education will have equipped him for nothing. His labor, even supposing that he were inclined to work, would not be worth its cost to any employer—partly because of the social charges necessary to keep others such as he in a state of permanent idleness, and partly because of his own characteristics. And so unskilled labor is performed in England by foreigners, while an indigenous class of permanently unemployed is subsidized. …
Finally, long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime.
In reading the City Journal article there is the sense that Dalyrymple is pulling his punches. The prose is funerary. He is too sad to gloat, too dismayed to revel in vindication. And like most of us has very little idea about what to do next.
Nature’s default method for dealing with failure is natural selection. It subjects individuals to a survival test and if they fail, they die. Having died they remove themselves from the gene pool (and probably the meme pool as well) and are heard from no more. Left to themselves the brood of the Welfare State would fare poorly. Without skills, having torched their surroundings and having, in the words of one Australian self-confessed Leftist “shit on their own doorstep” they would pick their surroundings clean and then perish from basic starvation.
But even the hardest-boiled conservatives are unlikely to let that happen and therefore this broken generation — the potential elves transformed into orcs in the mud of the welfare system — will have to be rescued from natural selection to at least some extent. But to what extent?
The bounds of the problem are obvious. People must not be shielded from the consequences of their actions to the extent where they become orcs again. Neither must they be left to die. Between these extremes there might be some trajectory of “tough love” which will at first a) stop producing more orcs and b) progressively reduce the existing number. In other words, you can think of Dalyrymple’s problem as the human capital equivalent of the financial deficit problem. The Left has saddled the world with not only financial but human liabilities. One is running rampage in the bond markets. The other is running riot through the streets of Britain. These can no longer be ignored nor can they be paid down instantly. All that can be done is simply to a) stop digging; b) begin the long process of retiring the human capital debt.
Unfortunately society cannot do this perfectly even if it wanted to. Lack of resources and the potential return of war and hunger may mean that despite our best efforts, natural selection will claim its victims, as it did in past and less prosperous ages. Back then, when a civilization’s cultural software declined it used to be put through an historical garbage-collection routine the Bible Calls the Four Horsemen algorithm, and its subroutines: Conquest, War, Famine and Death.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
It may be again. We forget how marvelous the last 70 years have been. There have been no world wars, a Pax Americana, a rising standard of living. Too bad that too many thought it was the default state of affairs. Natural selection is the natural state of affairs. And that is hard beast.
But we were taught, for those who believe in such things, that despite our differences and contempt for degeneracy, that all men are brothers and Death is our Common Enemy. Therefore the coming years must be spent trying to help even those who “would shit on their own doorstep” from being taken by the Pale Rider. The road will be long. It will go a mile, a year, a payment at a time. One individual saved here; another saved there. But it will be all we can do. And though the coming years may not see everyone saved the effort will be enough. “For whosoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
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Wretchard: You are beyond brilliant! I’m embarrassed to offer my meager prose as comments. I’m like a firefly buzzing towards the Sun.
[#1 of 4]
Reminds me of the containment strategy for the old USSR: that the thing would inherently self-destruct.
Well, history does provide examples.
Justinian put down the Nika riots by flooding the Hippodrome with imperial troops, who proceeded to kill 30,000 members of the rebellious “Green” faction. One can only imagine the carnage attendant to the slaughter of so many people in such a small place. The result: no more riots during Justinian’s rein.
The situation could get dramatically worse very quickly.
According to the UK Telegraph– 3 devout young Muslim men who were watching their Mosque and place of business were murdered by a gang of African- Caribbean looters in Birmingham.
The police have arrested one of the suspected murderers.
It is interesting that the Telegraph is non PC in explicitly describing the murderers as ” African-Caribbean”
The situation in the USA–according to Dalyrymples previous articles in The Spectator–is much worse than that in the UK.
Go to any inner city in any US state, particularly Chicago,Newark, East LA, Oakland CA-etc and you will see masses of uneducated, unemployed violent youths.
The difference between the UK and the US is that in the US these thugs are heavily armed with semi automatic assault weapons.
Large areas of East LA, Oakland, Chicago, Newark NJ etc are no-areas for the local police departments.
The disturbing new trend in California is that narco-terrorist Mexican gangs are now taking over
–The Mexican narco-terrorist are completely and ruthlessly homicidal.
The only way to control them is to move in combat hardened National Guard troops with armored vehicles and .50 Caliber machine guns and helicopter gun ships.
Dalyrymple was a prison psychiatrist for many years and he studied the gangs in the CA state prison system
–he warned of the coming explosion of narco-terrorist and drug gang extremist violence in American cities.
(1) The bounds of the problem are obvious. People must not be shielded from the consequences of their actions to the extent where they become orcs again.
(2)Neither must they be left to die.
I fear Wretchard that things are coming to the point where options 1 and 2 are incompatible. Perhaps such notions were intrinsically and logically incompatible all along. A rock, when dropped, cannot fall up and down at the same time. Orcs again? Once you go Orc you can’t come back.
Well, it’s more complex than that.
Individuals can remove themselves from the gene pool in several ways:
1. By failing to survive (eg, being killed by something before they get to reproduce, or by failing to reach reproductive age).
2. By failing to reproduce. This occurs to far more males than females if the data is correct.
3. By failing to provision and support their offspring so that they reach reproductive age and reproduce.
into the arena with them
Will “evolution in action” lead to armed autonomous enclaves, as in Niven & Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty?
The Darwinian consequenses in Britain seem to be visited on the idiots that believed a ban on guns would be their salvation. Of course criminals do not follow laws, including the ones outlawing the possession of weapons. Plus, you do not need a gun to kill someone but a gun used effectively will negate that as well. As the aged knight in Indiana Jones told the rich, nazi-sympathizer, “You have chosen poorly.” I would callously say things have transpired as they were intended. The only real question in my mind is: Will they learn any lessons from this? I can assure you Americans are taking note.
“God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal.”
Seattle fits the profile of a city poised for a ‘Yob Swarm”: it is packed with fluffy headed liberals, obssessed with bike paths and buying “locally” grown produce (trucked from eastern Washington, just like the large grocery chains do it), who have no understanding of the baby vipers they have nurtured in the city. Something will probably happen before the end of summer; I don’t have a crystal ball but living in Seattle’s south end a huge kid swarm would not surprise me at all. Every open 4 x 4 space is already swirled in graffiti — that’s a type of nighttime swarm activity…
‘But we were taught, for those who believe in such things, that despite our differences and contempt for degeneracy, that all men are brothers and Death is our Common Enemy. Therefore the coming years must be spent trying to help even those who “would shit on their own doorstep” from being taken by the Pale Rider.’
I think this is right. Our society created these people and now we are stuck with them as some weird kind of social overhead. We can reduce this overhead slowly by refusing to treat their children in the same knuckle-headed way that we treated the parents. We may always feel obliged to pay for a significant social overhead, but society must get something in return. Currently we get nothing.
On the bright side, there will always be some rough diamonds to be found there. We need to get better prospecting methods to find them. Then we must enable/make the rough diamonds to cut and polish themselves. I’m not talking about finding potential professional chest beaters in the sporter-tainment industry. There is a big system already in place for finding chest beaters. Neither do I mean lawyers, journalists, simple serpents, or social engineers. I mean finding people in the social overhead who can end up in the right hand end of the skill and competence bell curves, succeeding at wealth creating careers.
#10 Dex Quire
Speaking of “baby vipers”–
“David Cameron today gave the go-ahead for police to use water cannons on rioters after children as young as nine looted stores and made off with bottles of wine and vodka in fresh violence that flared around the UK yesterday. . . . He said that something was ‘seriously wrong’ with society ‘when you see children as young as 12 or 13 looting and laughing’.
Mr Cameron insisted the ‘fightback’ by police was succeeding today after a fourth night of rioting across the country. He said a ‘more robust approach’ by Scotland Yard last night had prevented a repeat of the worst trouble.
The PM said it was ‘simply not acceptable’ that violence was taking place and had spread to Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham overnight.
‘We will not put up with this in our country. We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets.
‘There are pockets of our society that are not only broken, but frankly sick…It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel that the world owes them something.’”
Photos of the underage drinkers at the link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024203/UK-RIOTS-2011-Manchester-Midlands-burn-London-control.html
The Darwinian approach to social problems looks good on paper
Variation
Selection
Retention
It relies upon the reproduction of the fittest.
Since the 60s the game changed with the adoption of Culture of Death.
Smart women are childless–men treat sex as a quasi gay sport.
The thug who was shot by police in London already had 4 kids by different women and he was only in his mid 20s.
Demographics is destiny–the educated narcissists in the West do not have children–they cramp their life style so they abort them.
We are facing a reverse of the last 2000 years of Christian Civilizations evolution.
The thugs and gang bangers breed–the smart set do not because it is not in metro-sexual fashion nor their economic interests.
Vanity of Vanities, All is Vanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Allisvanity.jpg
1. Fixing human capital is the core problem we are facing today. Value comes from people. Resources help, but resources are ultimately useless without human capital. Mohammed walked over the same oil deposits that now make Saudi Arabia wealthy and knew nothing of them. Doubtless we are walking over riches we know not how to transform. We may learn someday, but surely the chavs will never do it.
2. Fixing human capital depends on fixing the political system’s inclination to destroy human capital in order to produce a herd of slaves who will do the bidding of the elite for a handout. Unlike the private sector, which gains when human capital rises in value, a giant state, living for its own benefit, needs an army of rent-a-voters to create irrational policies to favor rentiers. Without such captive voting blocs the rentiers could not attain power. Without a multitude of political hacks, Boss Tweed would only have been Tweed.
3. The first step is to create or restore a system in which people are not punished for accumulating human capital; where it is no crime to “act white” or to succeed.
4. Faced with these conditions the debased human capital base may actually self-repair itself. Influenced by the new incentives people might work, study, create functional families and do something besides drink themselves into a stupor. Some people no doubt will not, but if the rules are set right these hopeless people will be relatively few and exert no influence on the larger culture. This relative few can be provided with such necessities as are basic to survival and no more. But they should not occupy the center. We have mainstreamed deviancy and thereby deviated from the mainstream.
5. Now we’ve got to get back. So the first thing is to realize we need to get back. Second, we’ve got to do it. Fortunately, the process of “getting back” should provide immediate positive feedback because one is generally happier not “shitting on on your own doorstep”. That may sound revolutionary and maybe it is. The first banner I would raise is, “don’t barf in your lap”.
~Veni; Vidi; Vici. — I came; I saw; I conquered.
~Veni; Vidi; Video. — I came; I saw; I got it on tape.
~Veni; Vidi; Vito. — I came; I saw; I paid my loan shark.
~Veni; Vidi; Velcro. — I came; I saw; I stuck around.
~Veni; Vidi; Visa. — I came; I saw; I shopped.
~Veni; Vidi; Vacuui. — I came; I saw; I left.
Courtesy Fire Frog’s Fun House
This isn’t The Abyss. It’s The Intermission.
DOW Futures @ -2
Of course 13.5 hrs is a long time for the markets.
It’s interesting in the “Lord of the Rings” that there was never an example of a repentant orc. According to Wikipedia, the origin of orcs is ambiguous, refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc_(Middle-earth)#The_origin_of_Orcs
One theory is they came from mud and slime (this version is what appeared in Peter Jackson’s movie). The other theory is that orcs came from corrupted elves.
It surprises me that Tolkien, being a devout Catholic, could not find it in his heart to allow for orcs to find redemption. I guess that would have made the narrative about killing orcs too complicated.
[#2 of 4]
I read Dalrymple’s book Life at the Bottom recently and it is scary to realize that most of it was written in the 1990s.
Another mind boggling book is Charles Murray’s Losing Ground published in 1984 which describes in depressing detail the government lunacy of the Great Society.
Finally get yourself real depressed by watching or reading Murray’s recent lecture The State of White America where he makes the case that lower class white America is sinking fast wrt illegitimacy, drug use, joblessness among males, etc. Our own home-grown utes!
Coming soon to a city near you!
“Without skills, having torched their surroundings….”
Rush Limbaugh likes to point out that after the Rodney King riots in LA, the denizans of the area were sent government checks to compensate them for their horrible ordeal. They got the checks and stood there with them in their hands, tears pouring down their cheeks. There was no place left intact to cash them.
After the LA riots there were complaints that not enough minority contractors were being hired to do the repairs, along with the threat “We burned down our neighborhood last time. Next time we burn down yours.”
Some people are in danger of finding out we do still have some Design Margin left. And it’s copper jacketed.
I’ll be approaching retirement age in a few years, but it is clear to me now that my children and future grandchildren will not be able to pay for my retirement and healthcare – the debt will be beyond their ability to pay – which means beyond their ability to labor – they will be slaves to banking debt-holders here and abroad. The only way out is for all able-bodied men and women (I’m not speaking of the truly disabled) to stay in the work force – or re-enter the work force. Unless our generation – and possibly the next generation – makes this sacrifice all future American generations (except for those in the would-be Marxist ruling class) will be living as serfs. If we sacrifice for our future generations they will be able to save for their own retirement and healthcare in old age – if our Federal government is changed to make it so.
Our generation is also tasked with amending our Constitution with term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court – and a limit on Federal taxation to 10% of GDP – with the states also limited to 10% – and with a prohibition of government self-creation of money by fiat. With these Constitutional limits on Federal government all un-Constitutional Federal payments will cease (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaide, etc., etc.) and will be picked up by the states or by the people themselves as individuals.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies… if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency…the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent that their fathers conquered.” Thomas Jefferson
11. westerncanadian:” Our society created these people and now we are stuck with them as some weird kind of social overhead.”
It is easy to say “our society” but some of us knew this would not end well and did not have power to stop it. If we were more locally connected to our government, IOW, limit the Federal Government as defined in the Constitution and let the State, City, County government handle their local population’s needs, this would not have gotten so far out of control. It was always someone else’s money. When charity was given through local churches, societies, etc., it only went to those truly needy, not to the lazy. We were conned, period.
14. wretchard: One step to correcting this problem is to bring back soup kitchens, updated of course. We have made it too easy to lie, cheat and steal. A resurgence of personal responsibility is called for and long overdue. Tough love is still love.
c @ 8: I think the British example unlikely to occur in the US for reasons we’ve discussed over the last few threads.
The difference is in another Niven book, “World Out Of Time”, in which he posits certain governments (China’s classic empire) that so suppress dissent that they become so weak, the first outside force to come along destroys it. This is what we (in the USA) have thought about Europe for a while. Niven’s protagonist is sent into the distant future because the ship’s computer believes that even a single individual, him, might topple the government if returned. Britain’s criminalization of citizen resistance is apparently the difference here, their very own social AIDS, their defenses so weak that a few yobs look to burn down the whole place. As we’ve said, doesn’t look like the US is in danger of quite that same problem. As a real rub not even France, that lets the Muslims burn down their own quarters, and few extra cars, but their police get very rough very quickly, moreso than in the USA, or so I gather. Though whether that will last another generation, or is even sufficient today against determine opposition is unclear.
It may be these Brit disturbances are just one of those things and will be over soon enough and not repeat for another ten years or so.
We all know so much of the strong blood moved to the New World (or Oz) from Britain and Europe three hundred years ago, and a lot more was lost in the wars since. There’s your social darwinism.
Insofar as I care to speculate further about social darwinism, what we might be seeing is a world wide increase in its intensity, the old average 100 IQ guys, of which there are plenty, are having an increasingly tough time of it in the developed world. It would seem easy for that to lead to riots, if a more paternal attitude is not there to “take care” of them. CAN the human race evolve a higher average IQ? Is that really what we want or need? Are these violent behaviors genetically determined, or perhaps social memes?
I dunno.
Let me stick to my Dow predictions.
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And Tolkien comments, when he gave Orcs speaking roles they actually had some personality not all that different from our own but they were working for bad leaders in a bad cause.
It’s the culture that is broken. If help is to be sought for more than 90 days, it’s got to be severe; orphanages/adoption for the kids and labor camps for the adults. Given these alternatives, there may be those who would prefer to help themselves.
W’s post at #14 holds the answer and its rebuttal, especially points 2 and 3. But we may be near the point of irreversibility in that the short term deprivations make it unlikely that the long term benefits will ever arise. We are eating our seed corn so as not to be too hungry tomorrow, not realizing that this will bring about starvation next season.
Will we ever make the accumulation of human (and financial) capital attractive again? Will the moochers ever stop plundering the producers? “A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice.”
Can this be reversed? Can we again elevate those who exercise their minds and their productive creativity and permit them their rewards? Not without the reinstitution of the now defunct values that built the West in the first place. What takes centuries to build can be destroyed in years and months. The termites have been eating at the foundation for many years. The building is getting ready to collapse.
Why should those capable of saving civilization reenter the fray when they will most likely be penalized for their success?
“Unlike the private sector, which gains when human capital rises in value, a giant state, living for its own benefit, needs an army of rent-a-voters to create irrational policies to favor rentiers. Without such captive voting blocs the rentiers could not attain power. Without a multitude of political hacks, Boss Tweed would only have been Tweed.” When the political system benefits from an army of rent-a-voter serfs, what are the incentives to allow creative producers who depend on and demand hard work and the rewards of their labor?
How did it start the last time we emerged from a Dark Age? Was it the Black Plague that caused serfdom to collapse and leave an opening for what evolved into the West? Will we be able to recover unless we have a calamity to make the current welfare/serfdom state crash?
The current round of “riots” will be quelled for a while but the rot underneath shows little sign of being contained and less of being reversed.
I loathe pessimism such as I am now immersed in but at this moment I see much darkness and very little light. I hope we have enough of that “design margin” to give us the time to begin the reclamation project.
The example of natural selection that applies here is the cuckoo problem, or “brood parasitism”. The host bird does not recgnize the cuckoo egg or the cuckoo chick. It is biologically programmed to care the most for the loudest, most aggressive chick, which is not its own. It can’t help itself. Some birds do recognize the cuckoo egg and kick it out of the nest.
The liberal societies are being victimized by their instinct to care for the weak and helpless, or as we see the “weak” and the “helpless”. Those who want to kick the cuckoo eggs and chicks out of the nest (I’m raising my hand in the back of the room here) and demonized as subhuman threats to a decent, caring society. But as TCobb (#5) points out, #1 and #2 may no longer be compatible.
Alas, someone has written what I have been thinking for some time now.
One thing I find interesting is that I heard the Prime Minister of England speak live this morning. In his speech he said that they would take back the streets and “not be stopped by phony human rights complaints”.
The thought was omitted from follow on recounts shown by the news.
I suppose it had something to do with time constraints.
In actuality, all this grand stuff will come down to programs and elections and candidates. The only earthly use it has is to see things from a bird’s eye view at least once before it is obscured in a welter of detail.
Discontinuities are times when you can see things in broad outline. They are fleeting moments, fortunately, when only peaks and valleys count. The houses, which are the real things in life, are invisible for a moment.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/imm.htm
The above link details the mathematics of open borders.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/gap.htm
And here’s the mathematics of closing the racial gap.
Britain should ship the yobs back to the Caribbean — the weather’s a lot nicer. No further immigration should be permitted. It serves absolutely no positive purpose. Families can re-unite when the Caribs go back home.
London has to stop placing free sugar upon the town square. Without state subsidies the game would not go on.
Has anyone ever posited why projection seems to be almost entirely the province of the left yet is largely absent on the center and right?
Tea partiers, called terrorists. While Tottenham is not a riot but an “uprising”.
If the ruling elite can’t call a spade a spade, but instead engage in blood libel against the only group who is really trying to solve the problem by assigning them the status of “dangerous”, where can the world turn next?
Developing human capital takes a long time.
A neurosurgeon will not be fully competent until he is 35 to 40 yrs old.
He trains another that will take a combined elapsed time of 60 yrs
Human capital takes a very long time to build and a culture that is very different from we now have in the US.
The US has relied on the brain drain, from the UK, Germany, Etc to drive our technology innovation–that source has dried up.
We are now a nation of day traders.
To change this culture will take at least 60 years.
That may well be too late for Christian Civilization in the West.
The future of 2000 yrs of Christian Civilization is in real real jeopardy.
The world is now run by day traders–short term–cut and run–no interest in human capital.
I agree with the “cuckoo’s egg” comparison. Another way to look at this: when you import enough Third World people into your county, you become a Third World country. There’s no going back to the “old” England of Mrs. Miniver, or even the England of the Mods and the Beatles, short of wholesale deportation of huge number of immigrants (many of whom are now legal citizens). In addition the dependency/poisonous mindset Darymple describes has now infected a significant portion of the underclass white “youth” as well.
Time will tell, maybe this will all calm down and be forgotten in the economic upheavals coming to Europe as the Euro collapses, or maybe this will become a semi-permanent state of chaos. London imports huge numbers of Third World low-IQ low-impulse-control types and now London is Mogadishu. A warning to what is left of the shrinking civilized world.
It was no fun doing nation-building in Iraq, now England is going to have to do nation-building in England.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjcL8M-DjZ8&feature=player_embedded#at=64
Alas, when the financial problems get too bad, the only solution is to declare bankrupcy, liquidate the bad debt, and hand whatever assets are left over to new management. That’s what happens when the burden of servicing the debt is greater than the earning capacity of the productive resources left to the organization.
By the time we stop digging, I’m afraid we’ll be in that situation regarding human capital as well.
The New Testament is for saving Civilized people. The Old Testament is for making civilized people out of barbarians. We aren’t civilized any longer.
20. SpeakEasy
I understand what you are saying. I get infuriated too when the ‘wrong’ government gets elected or the majority of my fellow citizens believe in ‘wrong’ ideas and I can see something cockeyed coming down the track. In my Province we occasionally get a socialist government elected (three times in the past 40 years) and they always do things that I know will cause grief. Then we throw them out and recover. The leftist progressives think the opposite of course, and they are fully entitled to believe that.
It’s the price of accepting the decisions made at the ballot box. One just has to keep promoting ideas and when possible, being prepared to act – make the union fully understand that you will get an injunction against them plus you’ll be all over the five o’clock news, if they won’t stop leaning on your non-union employees. Sometimes dogged commitment works.
How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish
We are not the first generation of New Yorkers puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattan’s tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy…
”But within a generation, New York’s Irish flooded into the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become the city’s schoolteachers; those who’d been the outcasts of society now ran its political machinery. No job training program or welfare system brought about so sweeping a change. What accomplished it, instead, was a moral transformation, a revolution in values.
“And just as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the late eighteenth century, had sparked a change in the culture of the English working class that made it unusually industrious and virtuous, so too a clergyman was the catalyst for the cultural change that liberated New York’s Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John Joseph Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York. How he accomplished his task can teach us volumes about the solution to our own end-of-the-millennium social problems…
http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a2.html
Back in the 80′s the term “predators” came in vogue among social workers. A predator was a kind of young urban male who was thought to be dangerous and also damaged beyond repair. Social workers declared them a loss and called for focusing efforts and resources on the really young kids to see if they could be saved. Another word associated with the predators is “feral”, a word still widely invoked to describe them.
In practice the predators’ prey turned out to be mostly other predators. I suppose that was a sign of the good times. During hard times, they seem to be casting their nets wider?
Feral is a strange word to describe the lot. The word does convey and animalistic wildness, but one found in a creature who lives independent of civilization. This urban underclass are very much products and dependents of the civilization around them, however. Self-sufficiency, provision for oneself through one’s own labors, is not exactly their strong-suit. In fact, it is exactly what they cannot do. They would have been better off having been truly feral, as in “Wild Indian” vs. “Reservation Indian”.
Anything is better than what they’ve been given, even being given nothing at all is better than what they’ve been given. This recognition is what motivated Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and such other leaders.
The Wild Indians had a wide pantheon of great leaders, come to think of it. That all stopped on a dime the moment they wound up on the reservation. Once tied down there, it seems very hard to get out.
So, did they become predatory lenders? Inquiring minds want to know.
Another fantastic post, Wretchard. I think the natural selection idea applies on multiple levels of scale, both in the animal world and in the human arena.
Consider not just how many species, but how many whole related families have come and gone on this Earth. Natural selection doesn’t just apply to individuals, but it applies on an equal level to entire branches of the tree of life. Many are pruned, because their niche is taken over by some new arrival who is able to displace *all* of the previous occupants.
The same applies to cultures, governments, and entire nations. Many have come – many have gone. Those who have not been able to maintain the harsh focus on their own survival, and who instead have let the failing parts of their own society drag down the whole, pass from the scene and are replaced by something new.
I suggest that unless some radical cure is applied soon, civil society and the currently constituted democratic government in the UK will pass from the scene, just as so many other failed governments have passed away. What will replace it? Whatever or whoever is able to supply enough concentrated force to a) restore order and b) wipe away the old system along with all other challengers.
Not really that difficult a prediction – this actually has been the common state of human affairs for most of human history. Barbarian hordes can only be ruled by a Barbarian King. Undoubtedly one is on the way.
Mark Twain once wrote something to the effect that if ou take a stray dog and raise him up a feed him and make him prosperous he will not bite you and that is the principle difference between a dog and a man. These yobs are a sorry lot but oddly they may have it right in blaming the rich because only a rich society could have afforded the “social” programs that created their dyspeptic, brutish, cruel, and nihilistic world.
Are these yobs really any more destructive of anything, than the Democratic party in Congress, or the leaders of our banking and financial institutions over the past ten years?
The rioters’ big mistake was to go Full Morgoth. You never go Full Morgoth.
Now even the lefties have realised they shouldn’t have been playing with the Ring of (Socialist) Power.
Feral is a reasonable description. The housecat has been domesticated for less time than the dog, so a feral cat is closer to it’s wild ancestor than a feral dog is to a wolf. Thus, feral cats hunt and prosper reasonably well, either in or ourside of human civilzation. But a feral dog is a pitiful thing, without the skill to hunt and forced to skulk around the edges of the civilization that it rejected.
Dogs have been domesticated longer than cats. Humans have been domesticated longer than dogs.
It’s true that the urban dystopia is completely a man made product. It’s also true that it’s spreading. I was heading out to lunch with a young colleague who had an 10-year alumni album from his high school that provided updates on where everybody was at.
This guy is an electrical engineer (and a damn good one), put perusing the album it was striking how singular he was.
I had no idea what most of his fellow alumni were up to. Most were liberal arts graduates of some stripe, lots were degreed in very strange and esoteric things. Many had become activists, or into marketeering, or some kind of artistic thing. An amazing number of them were living abroad. My friend was nearly alone in engineering pursuits. I saw no scientists.
I can’t imagine how ripped up the young man of today feels coming out of college with his history, philosophy, or govenment degree must feel. In unforgivable debt up to his eyeballs, with no employable skill to speak of, and set adrift in the heart of a global depression. Another fine product fresh off the liberal assembly line!
This is straight up Yuri Bezmenov.
The problem of surplus males is not a new one for humanity. We may be arriving by the most circuitous and expensive route at the position the Ummah faced as a baked in organizing condition. We may need to resort to the same solution. When ten percent or more of your young males have no prospect of wealth generating work or a productive social life rooted in a stable family then you need to export them. Let them travel and meet other people’s to broaden their horizons sample their wares dip into the gene pool, and then subjugate them. With luck much of your surplus perishes and enough of the victims survive to provide wealth to fuel further conquests. Slightly amusingly this was the Marxist interpretation of Colonial Capitalist Imperialism. That was a narrow reading of Europe’s past but a more accurate if suppressed view of Islam’s. Given that China is also facing a baby bubble of Little Emperor’s from the hinterlands the confluence of these testosterone laden waves should be dramatic.
What the Brits ought to do, and what they would have done 100 years ago, is organize two armies, one of Afro-Caribbeans and the other of White CHAVs. Land one at Tripoli Libya and the other at Tripoli Lebanon. Tell them that enough food and ammunition to survive will be delivered (air dropped these days) as they advance and the pay and beer will be waiting for the first one to get to Khartoum. Once they get there point them at Tehran. These are not the raw materiel of a modern military, although to sound high minded the military does provide the best route for upward mobility for those seeking to get out of a hole and join society and the talented few will be spotted and promoted if they survive,, but they are the stuff of old fashioned cannon fodder. God help their officers.
Regarding the origin of orcs in Middle Earth. Tolkien was clear that they were descended from elves who got lost trapped and seduced by Melkor before and during the Great Journey from the East. Now elves are immortal and when they die their spirits fly to the Halls of Mandos to either await the End or until they are sent back to Middle Earth. Therefor even if that gift was withdrawn from the orcs, who being spiritually dead must simply decompose when their flesh is destroyed, there would have to be a record of generations of spirits of trapped and tortured elves slowly being corrupted and changed that could be seen in the Undying Lands. Melkor also created trolls in mockery of the ents but there is no story of him perverting them to that end. Trolls on the other hand are among the few examples of actual creative work, as opposed to just transforming through brute power, by Melkor-Morgoth after he rebelled.
The constabulary in the UK is also a piece of work as I can guarantee you they are more concerned about “vigilantism” then they are about these yobs burning and looting the whole country. But if the King literally cannot control his own high street this dude will emerge from the woodwork to fill the void.
http://theboondocksaints.wikia.com/index.php?title=Noah_MacManusimage=Boondock_1-jpg
It’s an oversimplification, I think, to apply natural selection to what is really a process of cultural evolution. As has been pointed out in other places, many of the best of us have worked to give the poorest and most disadvantaged a shot at survival and success. Not for any reason other than that we saw something salvageable and worthwhile in them. Who, in that scenario, is supposed to be weeded out, like a white fruit fly against a sooty background? What about the fact that some of the most laudable human beings lived lives of celibacy, never reproducing, and/or going to their deaths out of reverence for something higher than themselves? Were they unimportant? Did they not straddle history and mold it in their name? Were they, like so many of his victims, worse than Stalin because he lived longer than they did and had more children?
No. Death is not the arbiter of success and failure as natural selection would argue. It’s as Robert’s post @ 33 implies: value comes from something beyond us and gets disseminated in unpredictable ways. It’s not that everyone can be saved, or even really about who gets to live and who does not. That’s important for the animals but not for us. We’re about something much grander which is not confined to the natural world and what is selected for therein.
The task before us is to care for each other as best we can, to go out among the lepers. What we do for or to them we do for or to Him. That’s what matters in the long run. It’s like C. S. Lewis wrote: “He who lives for this life and not the next gets neither. He who lives for the next life gets both.”
What Revelation unveils is what has happened, is happening, and will happen. This current upheaval is the opportunity of a lifetime, for rich and poor, old and young, crippled and healthy alike. Who lives and who dies is small potatoes.
38. Are these yobs really any more destructive of anything, than the Democratic party in Congress, or the leaders of our banking and financial institutions over the past ten years?
I don’t know, but they seem to be better at creating real jobs.
Islamic Groups try to overthrow the UK Government?
http://diversityischaos.blogspot.com/2011/08/islamic-online-forums-are-abuzz-with.html
“The $64 trillion question is what do we do about it?” –Wretchard
The problem is at the top so start cutting salaries at the top. Take all GS12 to GS15 salaried employees and cut their wages by at least 30%.
That goes for 0bama (In 0bama’s case he should lead by example instead of by teleprompter talk and cut his salary to $1 per year – his other income streams will be enough).
Here is a good example of a bad example – which is probably the norm in DC.
[Mickey Kaus]
“The first one that jumps out is the ‘Associate Administrator for Administration’ at the Department of Transportation, which pays $119,554 to $179,700. It seems that this person will do administrative work to maintain the layer of bureaucracy that “coordinates” the DOTs research programs.”
http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/09/obama-not-much-further-we-can-cut/
This is the infamous type of overpaid cup-cake job which leads to more regulation that costs taxpayers unseen billions per year. These types of jobs must be reduced or eliminated to heal the economy. There must be no more molesting of the economy by government. It is destructive and must stop now.
Until, we see real evidence of sharply decreased salaries and spending at the Federal Government I can only recommend that people sell into the stock market rallies and get into cash and gold.
The riots in Britian seem to bookend the mass murders in Norway. Only the bookends are in the middle and the books are on the outside.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wP-4ZV8sv0
Aloha ‘Oe: Greetings; farewell. Hawaiians have always known that the two are inseparable. The rise of Western Civilization, like the rise of any civilization, is the beginning of an arc, not the beginning of a straight and ever rising line. So it is Aloha ‘Oe, for we are on the downward arc, and if the end comes not today then surely tomorrow. For the writing on the wall is now entirely legible, and readable for those who choose to see. But it sure was fun while it lasted.
Farewell to thee, farewell to thee
The charming one who dwells in the shaded bowers
One fond embrace
“Ere I depart
Until we meet again
I fear I am now maudlin. I fear for my grandchildren, but am confident they will survive, though I am not so confident the world as we have known it will. The days of savagery are returned.
Many of the commenters, as well as Wretchard, seem to believe that they, individually, or through some unnamed “Us,” are going exercise control over what the choices will be. You need to consider that it will be otherwise. It seems to me that only in our effete, hot house culture would this be considered.
You certainly will have choices, but not the ones that you might choose. Instead, consider the implicit choice Rutger Hauer(Roy) offered Harrison Ford(Decker) in BLADE RUNNER. “You’d better get it up Decker.”
seeing both Mark Twain and feral cats mentioned in this thread, it put me in mind of one of my favorite quotes on the subject.
“Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.” – Mark Twain
Curious – to me an American – that I’ve come across no references to the Queen’s view on the current episode. Given the inept response from her government, this would appear to be the appropriate time for suitable words of inspiration and reassurance – whether empty or of substance.
40/JMH:
Re “But a feral dog is a pitiful thing, without the skill to hunt and forced to skulk around the edges of the civilization that it rejected.”
Wrong. When groups of dogs go feral they form packs and hunt quite effectively. If they are near human habitation they both hunt and scrounge. They only seem pitiful to you because you’re anthropomorphizing them. In fact their behavior around humans is marvelously adaptive. In the wild, absent any humans, they revert to ancestral pack behavior and hunt for food in cooperative groups. Those that don’t sufficiently pack-oriented or skilled at hunting are either driven from the pack or killed, also an adaptive behavioral trait. In Africa, Australia, and the American Southwest packs of feral dogs thrive and flourish. Solitary dogs that go feral also can also make out quite well. I know this is true because I cared for feral dogs.
Totally off topic but extremely cool, refer to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/10/us-military-fastest-plane-falcon
Here’s another image just as the launch fairing comes off:
http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ap_webfeeds/2f2867ede0457611f50e6a706700edea.jpg
This is a DARPA project and I know nothing about the details but it looks way cool. Truth to tell, the first time I saw an image of it was through the above URL. I suspect it’s scramjet propelled. The scramjet inlets and body flap would be on the other side of the vehicle (the shape of inlets would be classified which is why they’re not showing them). If it was simply an unpowered reentry vehicle then it would be less interesting (the USAF was flying some really interesting maneuverable reentry vehicles back in the late 1970s). It appears this vehicle has sharp leading edges. This means someone has cracked the problem of hafnium diboride thermal protection systems. A few years ago, NASA tried to make hafnium diboride work but only succeeded in embarrassing themselves. To bad this project is classified. It would be fun to know more about it. Anyone out there who can talk about this?
[#3 of 4]
From the Telegraph UK http://tgr.ph/mWZWC6
“London riots: Harriet Harman attempts to link EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) cut and tuition fees to the anarchy in Britain’s cities…
“Politically, Labour should be doing rather well out of the night-time anarchy in Britain’s cities. The Coalition Government was caught completely off-guard as looting mobs laid waste to parts of London – and it was only yesterday that David Cameron and Boris Johnson returned from their respective holidays.
But – and you knew this was coming – Labour have totally screwed it up. Ken Livingstone thought the rioters needed someone to “care about them and speak for them”. Ed Miliband gave largely unnoticed and (according to some) pathetic statements about the violence. And now, on Newsnight, Harriet Harman has attempted to partly blame the Education Maintenance Allowance for the riots.
A furious Michael Gove didn’t let her get away with it.”
As noted over on the Commentary Magazine blog, Contentions, “Gove puts on…(an) impressive display of one-on-one ideological and moral combat” by calling out Harman on repeatedly and pointedly on the morally bankrupt notion that there’s a relationship between a handful of spending cuts and nights of violent rioting. http://tinyurl.com/4xzjs8w
Gove promoted UK majority resolve againt the “7/7″ killers, who were supported by 26% of UK muslims in one poll. He was marginalized.
The bottom of the Left-Islamo barrel – Media Monitors – calls for more socialism, as remedy for mirthful looting. Makes sense to a moron.
http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/88611
The riots followed wildly publicized intentions of UK muslim groups to enforce “shariah zones” during Ramadan. Authorities refused to respond that that clear act of Sedition. It was that indulgence that led Black looters to take advantage of a cop killing of a street criminal.
–CAN the human race evolve a higher average IQ? Is that really what we want or need? Are these violent behaviors genetically determined, or perhaps social memes
Evil and sin have always been with us. For the prior few thousand years, those whose intellectual talents aren’t above average were helped to live productive, moral lives where they contributed to the betterment of society by being taught a few rules. Don’t murder; don’t steal; don’t covet; honor one’s elders; pray and worship God. If you followed these, you didn’t loot or riot; you didn’t flip mortgaged homes while lying on the credit application; you didn’t have children out of wedlock, and you stayed married to your spouse and raise the kids, etc. All in all, a few rules had decent consequences. Sure, the smarter folk could try to deviate from this path, and work out for themselves after a while that they were mistaken, but in the past, when people saw a fence, they didn’t immediately tear it down, but thought “someone must have had a reason to put a fence there” so to speak.
Yes, those below average are seemingly more dispossessed now. But that’s because the moral structure has been taken away, and they are at sea with no knowledge of how to behave. The fences have all been torn down and they have not the self inspection to figure out where they must have been, and what good they did.
it’s the moral IQ that matters.
OT but this guy is probably an EPA employee who is vacationing in Canada.
ledger #48
“The problem is at the top so start cutting salaries at the top. Take all GS12 to GS15 salaried employees and cut their wages by at least 30%”
Not enough by far.
A better plan would be to elminate 30% of public sector jobs (preferably the highest paying ones) at all levels of government. Then give the rest of the PS work force a 25-30% salary cut, and cap their pay at that level for 25 years, no COLA for any reason including hyperinflation. End their pension plan and throw them in with the rest in Social Security. Simultaneously deport illegal aliens to free up positions in nonskilled laboring jobs that those laid off can then take for subsistence. Two problems solved. If they’ve ramped up their lifestyle and debt load to their current salary, and this causes them a radical downshift of lifestyle, or geographical displacement, tough. Let them suffer the consequences. It seems fitting just desserts at this point.
Even if doing this represents only a small percentage of the total government cost and only makes a minor difference in reducing the debt, it is a worhtwhile thing to do from a philosophical and trend setting standpoint. I would refer to Gladwell’s “tipping point” idea.
The idea that a public school teacher can make $60,000 a year or that a school superintendent or high level pencil pusher at the EPA or OSHA can make six figures is obscene, immoral, and unsustainable at any time but worse so by several orders of magnitude when the private sector (for whom they ostensibly work and are supposed to SERVE, not RULE) is bleeding so badly.
Societies evolve from basic ones, where your workload is so great just to survive that you have nothing left over at the end of the day to cause trouble. Then, when manufacturing succeeds agriculture as the main thing, that too keeps people busy and productive, and, in a good way, disciplined. Western society has gone to the next stage, where the time-consuming basic labour of making things has been outplaced to China. Unemployment is rife, social security pays what our aboriginal people call “sit-down money”, and people’s values are shot to bits by secular (a)moral relativism.
We need to either rediscover the benefits of manufacturing, or at least devise infrastructure improvements (like home improvements on a grander scale) that will employ the workers and, preferably, use our own raw materials and energy too. The work ethic and the christian religion could once again save us. But not if the left-leaning media have much to do with it.
This problem of redeeming human capital has been dealt with before, and in this very same England. The purpose of Methodism was to teach the lower-class denizens of Gin Alley the middle-class skills needed to thrive and contribute. It may be that religion has been rendered unpursuasive, but the lower classes in eighteenth-century England weren’t noticeably religious either.
Victor @ 29
I couldn’t agree with you more. In addition, there is an element of “Tragedy of the Commons” in the situation. I was on a university faculty for twenty-five years where I saw everyday that those who operated for the short-term (politic for grant funds, publish quick-and-dirty trivia, grade inflate) were rewarded over my fund-my-own research, publish a few well-cited papers, and tough-love for students approach. I could have stayed in that job a few more years as a martyr. Instead I literally became a day-trader. Society’s elite sets the incentives, and the elite no longer has any wisdom.
I could never really grasp what ‘post modern’ meant. Now it appears to be a closed system, an interim that slides back to ‘pre-modern’.
Michael #25 : re David Cameron’s words. David Cameron is essentially a PR expert and therefore master politician, as in truth in advertising? He must have known that his chest beating words were vacant.
His Tory Party under Edward Heath, all subsequent Labour and Tory Parliaments going along, surrendered sovereignty of the British Parliament to the European Union years ago. With that sovereignty the design and enforcement of laws for the British Population. The European Court now precedent over Parliament, in itself eerie as European Law is Napoleonic, while British Law is Common/Roman. Parliament is able only to obey or accede to the judgements from that European Court. Which the Brits ,in contrast to many others in that EU, generally do. Others, e.g. France, Italy, Greece, Belgium ignore with impunity,
That Court representative only of the ambitions of power hungry politicians and bureaucrats over formerly relatively free and sovereign citizens, e.g. Maastricht Treaty and EURO. That Court with ITS determination, definition, and judgements of human rights.
How then does Mr. Cameron plan to “not be stopped by phony human rights complaints”?
No Mo #60:
A 30% across the board cut is a horrible idea. It has been tried and was the main feature of Al Gore’s Reinventing Government Initiative. The biggest problem is that given a 30% cut the people in DC hand it down to each department in an approach called the “Peanut Butter Spread.” So they avoid the big decisions such as whathell the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy and HUD really are for and why we need a National Screw Threads Standards Commission or a Rural Electricfication Agency and everybody gets cut by 30%.
Under the Al Gore disaster, DoD, already cut by 40% in the post Cold War downsizing, was told to cut another 30% out of civilian employment. And Gore’s bill had other neat features such as no contracting out to comply and no ability to ignore Congressional Pork and special reporting directives (which have increased by 1000% over the last 40 years); the only thing you could “ignore” was your real mission workload.
And Gore also caused government employees to focus on keeping their jobs rather than doing them. That is when government workers really got poltically active – in self defense.
Ledger #48:
After Clinton signed the Reinventing Government Bill, watchdog groups noted three new levels of bureaucracy of the “Deputy Associate Undersecretary for Left Handed Widgets on Alternate Tuesdays” sort.
Good point, Surellin,and it goes beyond that. The problem is not just the absence of constructive religion but the replacement of one religion by another.
The essence of the problem we are now dealing with is that Secular Humanism is a bad religion, and until we grasp that fully no solution is possible. Rather than offering a path to the understanding of higher truths, Secular Humanism acts to obscure them and necessarily results in a race to the bottom.
The first thing we have to do is wrap our minds around the fact that this is a religious war, not merely a political one.
As for post-modernism, Don, it grows necessarily out of modernism and is really just a more overt form of nihilism.
Roughcoat #54:
I second that. My current canine companion, a Rhodesion Ridgeback/Labrador mix was adopted from a shelter; she had been a stray, roaming with her sister before that.
This is a very well cared for, much loved and pampered pet, who asks for a share of anything anyone is eating and usually receives it, in addition to her own food. But she has killed and eaten at least one bird in the backyard, goes after every squirrel she sights, and “grazes” for tasty plants in the backyard every day.
One quick, but politically difficult, answer would be to “neuter” those on the dole. Not physically, politically. You simply withdraw the right to vote from anyone that gets a check from the government. This would make them have to decide whether to suck the teat without the benefits of power, or break the dependency habit and regain political clout. The pols would be free to consider programs from a cost/benefit basis rather than using other people’s money as a vehicle for purchasing votes. There would no longer be vast blocks of voters whose sole mission in life is to vote more benefits (for themselves) from the public treasury.
Far too direct, I know, the pols would never take such an action.
A revolution mmight.
68. RWE
My brother-in-law has a hunting dog that is Rhodesian Ridgeback/Labrador, best darned hunting dog I have ever seen. He seems to completely understand what we are out there to do, from hunting pheasant to chasing racoons and bears, to retreiving downed ducks and geese, he has an uncanny sense of where to drive the game and is often in the water before the bird is hit by the shot.
Old Ben is an amazing dog. He guards my neice and nephew as if his life depends on it but is a gentle as they come. At eight years he has slowed down a bit but I wouldn’t take any other dog I know into the feild. I hope yours lives many a happy year.
No one knows with certainty how this will play out. We are tempted to despair. What to do?
Teach those who would listen. The message, above all, must be clear. All men are not brothers from the perspective of spiritual condition. Physical death is not the common enemy, but a certainty for all mankind. Spiritually, we are children of God or servants of evil in its many guises, often cloaked as morality, invoking moral imperative.
The greatest lie is that, because of my own efforts, I am a good person, therefore, I will go to heaven. Such entrance is only procured through someone qualified to grant entrance. It is only obtained by faith, that not of ourselves, it is a gift of God.
We see a clear struggle against the tyranny of well-intentioned, but self-deceived progressives who would subjugate all and ruin all in futile pursuit of the lost garden. As if establishing the conditions of equality would restore mankind to our former condition of innocence and perfection.
In the secular struggle, the middle third must be educated concerning the deceptions being deployed and the ultimate outcome of the surrender of liberty for promises of security and prosperity that cannot be provided by governments.
The Boom Bust Cycle is Caused by Cultural Evolutionary Rot
There have been many cycles of boom and bust. I have a new explanation for the bust. It is cultural evolutionary rot. Prosperity blocks the natural cleansing of evolution and reproductive channels become clogged with inferior information transmission. As the culture becomes contaminated with erroneous ideas, instability sets in and prosperity is destroyed.
The cycle begins with poverty. In this condition, the requirements for survival are scarce and people perish from starvation, disease or exposure to the elements. This could happen, for example, after an ice age or an economic contraction. It is an ideal evolutionary environment. Only the most fit survive and reproduce. This is true also of culture. Wrong-headed ideas have led to people dying, and those ideas have consequently been abandoned by those surviving.
People are very much in touch with reality.
The next step is economic growth, almost certainly according to the Adam Smith model. People learn to cooperate, trade and complement each other’s skills. Action (labor) becomes more productive, and prosperity is generated. Culture thrives and begins to insulate people from objective reality. Governments are formed and people become ‘altruistic,’ meaning that they are happy to give other people’s wealth to support those who would otherwise be unable to survive. This egalitarianism extends to culture where all ideas are deemed equally worthy. Since the non-fit are not allowed to perish, the reproductive channels of both genes and cultural information become filled with reproductive trash. This is not an ideal evolutionary scenario.
People have lost touch with reality.
As altruism and egalitarianism take hold, action becomes less productive, and prosperity is reduced. Because of the fragility of the productive system, the decline is usually catastrophic. Bubbles burst; markets crash; revolutions arise; terrorism abounds. After a while there are fewer people and less culture and more contact with reality. The cycle begins anew.
In order to break the cycle, the emerging culture must recognize the nature of the cycle. The true principles of evolution and economics have to have been recognized and preserved.
Anton #69 and #70:
I think we will soon be coming to an actual “neutering.” Per the “Marching Morons” idea, it is already very probably possible to create in the laboratory the means to selectively reduce human birthrates to near zero. This should be simple racially – which is kind of bad news, since the destructive memes are not strictly racial in distribution. But no doubt it also will be possible to make sure that anyone who has taken certain drugs or engaged in certain kinds of behavior cannot have children as well. And I am not sure that anyone will be able to stop it, either. The anger when they realize what is happening will make the London riots look like a Tea Party picnic
My dog Bessie is a much better dog to take running than was my previous dog, a Lab. My Lab’s paws tore easily on pavement, whereas my Ridgeback/Lab has paws that are like rough sandpaper. She is also built more for running than a Lab, having a very poised gait. On the other hand, my Lab loved to wade in the water, although she was not much for swimming, but the new dog has no desire to get near the water, 3 feet away being too close for her.
So long as human beings are thought of, and treated as, economic cogs (draft animals of varying degrees of skill and capability) they will tend to act accordingly. Which is to say they will act as animals. If the only or dominant appeal to them is aimed solely at their material condition and potential to add or subtract to that condition their world will center on material matters. Envy, greed, resentment, anger – these are attitudes and attributes that come naturally to such people whether they have or have not. Many of those who have not will want and their desire will direct them to take. Many who already have will wish to keep and their desire will direct them to hold and defend. And anger is near universal with both groups.
I used to wonder why Chesterton had such a fondness for the middle ages. I now understand at least a little why this was the case. In those times even the great lords admitted that men were “a little lower than the angels” and understood that how they treated their fellows – even the lowest – could have severe and eternal consequences. Those people sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded in acting like human beings and not as animals ruled entirely by desire and driven by anger and fear. Today the “leaders” of what was once Christendom rarely even try to pretend they care for people as children of God and questions of eternity and our place in it are not given any consideration.
A world ruled under philosophies that raise material wealth and power to the throne of supremacy is a world where humans can be herded, indoctrinated and/or coereced to “do the right thing”. The “right thing” is whatever serves the furthering of the dominant philosophy. Since there are no eternal consequences under consideration – these being held as non-existant – it is permissible to use any and every method to achieve “the right thing”. The methods are as varied as humans are capable of making them but they have this in common: that human beings are no more significant or important than a draft animal or bulldozer and are treated in proportion to their usefulness and value as contributors to the political economy of the state.
Why would anyone be even surprised by crime and riots in such societies?
66. RWE
No Mo #60:
“A 30% across the board cut is a horrible idea”
Agreed. As someone who has done contract work with a large federal agency, when cut come down the first people to get teh axe are the employees who actually work for the public. The managers, supervisors, and associate managers and heads of various projects and bureaus are the last to go, due to seniority and union rules.
You should also know that skilled workers in federal employ typically make LESS than they would in private sector (scientists, lawyers, doctors), but mid-level managers make much more than they would, and there are many more of them than any viable corporation could tolerate.
It is normal to have a team of lawyers or engineers with post graduate degrees supervised by someone with a 4 year degree who makes significantly more money – by virtue of being a manager.
I heard recently an agency near me is cutting hours in field offices all over the country (you know, where they actually interact with citizens) but hiring more managers and judges in HQ, who make 2-3x what the low level field office workers make.
Cutting everything by a fixed amount puts power in the hands of the bureaucracy to score political points by closing popular services and national parts, while protecting their own jobs and their union cronies. Instead, we should focus on the gradual elimination of entire agencies that stifle the private sector – think Depts of Ed, Energy, EPA, SBA. Congress could simply write a law freezing their budgets and forbidding any new hiring.
Or a prize – whichever agency drafts the most regulations in a given year gets an automatic cut in the salary of it’s leadership and commissioners.
Get the dead albatross off the neck.
Victor 4. “East LA … you will see masses of uneducated, unemployed violent youths. Large areas of East LA … are no-areas for the local police departments.”
Not quite. As a realtor East LA is part of my service area and I am frequently going about my business down there. Those hordes of heavily armed, belligerent Latino yoots have escaped my notice. Even though I am obviously a white man (can’t hide this gorgeous face, not that I’d want to! [/humor]) I’ve never been nervous about going to East LA. South Central is another matter. I have to admit, though, that I seldom go there at night, so who knows, maybe they are vampiric?
The core of what is being described can be boiled down to a disconnect between consequences and actions, on a personal level. Alternately phrased, it’s the “moral hazard” problem. While this discussion is confined to the effects of the policies of the Left on the poor/lower-class, etc., the moral hazard problem runs through all levels of our Western/Enlightenment society. I see it in the US Bankruptcy Code, the bailouts of the financial companies, and even, to some degree, in the notion of a “non-recourse” loan.
Wretchard, you describe the problem succintly when you write, “People must not be shielded from the consequences of their actions to the extent where they become orcs again. Neither must they be left to die. Between these extremes there might be some trajectory of “tough love” which will at first a) stop producing more orcs and b) progressively reduce the existing number.”
Applied to the entire breadth of society, I’m totally behind this. Just as the public school drop-out should not be overly-shielded from the consequences of his choice to drop-out, neither should the holder of the riskiest tranches of MBS, the financial institutions that created, marketed, sold, and often held lots of the MBS, nor the homeowner with negative equity be overly-shielded from the consequences of their choices.
The core difficulty inherent in the our era’s confusion and instability is that it remains far from clear whether what we confront is merely the collapse of welfare statism (good) or the early innings of the Fall of Western Civilization (far from good).
What is clear is that the parasites are killing the host. They have already made the welfare state untenable, but it is distressingly uncertain whether that welfare state can be dismantled quickly enough to prevent its ever-increasing administrators and dysfunctional spawn from destroying the entire cultural endeavor of the last 500 years.
As I observe the extent to which we are overseen by senescent institutions generally at odds with the interests of most individuals, I’m inclined to wonder whether freedom-loving citizens are courageous enough — and numerous enough — to effect the necessary overhaul. The historical role of a nation-state was to carry history and suppress violence, but those functions have to an alarming degree been supplanted by little more than intrusive micro-management of things that don’t really matter.
Faced as we are by rising generations who ignore history, an intellectual class that rejects it, and non-assimilating immigrants who overwhelm it; and buffeted as we are by increasing levels of retail violence, I suspect the classic nation-state is in greater jeopardy than commonly realized.
When wide swaths of a populace are unable to differentiate between precision and accuracy (or for that matter, celebrity versus importance)they largely lack the intellectual or emotional tools required for making difficult political and economic decisions. When cultural trends primarily work their way up from the bottom — for example the baggy, beltless shorts, etc (informal prison dress), or the Brazilian Wax job (porn films) — it is clear that western cultural vigor and discernment have atrophied just as badly as its intellectual rigor has done.
Such confused and un-rooted folk are both increasingly numerous and far too easily influenced by raw demagoguery. We’re seeing the results across much of the “West.”
One thing leading to the ultimate collapse of Rome was a deadly mix of debased currency and heavy taxes on the most productive citizens. For generations Rome had depended for food upon a system of larger farms called latifundia. The imperial regime bought their food with increasingly debased coins, yet insisted taxes be paid with bullion or non-debased coins.
Towards the end these latifundia simply stopped producing food at a commercial scale and opted for what amounted to self-sufficiency production and barter within the local community. Rome could no longer feed its legions and the troops drifted back to their home communities where they knew the would be fed. Iohannus Galtus People in Rome itself began producing food in the city, lest they starve. “Urban agriculture,” anyone?
And as a final vignette, this spring a boy about 9 years old came up to me while his mother was shopping in our business, an on-farm retail shop. His question rocked me: “Mommy says that when you were a boy men used to fly to the Moon! Is that true?” But for the technical particulars (and the fact I was then in my 20s) the same question could have been asked in the early 6th Century instead of the early 21st.
MES@77: I see it in the US Bankruptcy Code
Something like 60% of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills according to studies from 2005 and confirmed in 2009.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bankruptcies+due+to+medical+bills&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
@ 76. Tamquam
You are correct–I meant South Central LA and Compton.
In the new gang structure the dominant gangs are the Mexican narco-terrorists–the traditional Black gangs are their enforcers.
These new hyper violent gangs recruit in the CA State Prison System.
These gangs dominate areas of LA, Oakland, San Diego and smaller communities like Salinas and East Palo Alto (just over 1 mile east of Stanford University Campus)
Dex Quire (10): Maybe, but Seattle also has something that England is sorely lacking, outside of a few recent arrivals: people who will fight back, and who have the means to do so. Look at the way Mayor Nickels got slapped down in his attempts to institute a (completely illegal) firearms ban on city property.
Until, we see real evidence of sharply decreased salaries and spending at the Federal Government I can only recommend that people sell into the stock market rallies and get into cash and gold.
So, “ledge,” drastically cutting the salaries of legions of federal workers is a solution? How about we cut out a whole bunch of legions instead, so we don’t have to pay them anything? We compensate the remaining ones fairly, and demand competence in return.
The Darwinian metaphor breaks down when we talk of human life, which in order to reach highest expression must abide in a civilization. There is nothing “natural” here. Many of our best fell in the Somme or Normandy and left no children. Some of greatest–the likes of Beethoven and Brahms–leave no-one behind, or often if they do, what follows is less than their true mark on the Human journey. Whole lines where wiped out the great wars of the 19th and 29th centuries. Meanwhile, the worse of us where back there fornicating away and leaving us with their dubious spawn. It is hardly a matter of having children. If civilization truly allowed the best to “reproduce” and weeded out what was low, the world would be an altogether different place. That which is high in us is a miracle indeed.
No, the point of human life is spiritual ascent–this is the essence of our time here and not merely some animal, materialist “Darwinian” passage. This not to say that having children is not a large part of that ascent, but this is hardly because of some materialist notion of “reproduction”.
Perhaps, paradoxically, Darwin applies to Civilization at large in the world and in time, but not Man as his fullest, for he is more than an animal
Besides, our lumpen prole will have no trouble reproducing, and they will find plenty of political opportunists to give them harbor.
It is foolish to imagine that the Left will stand down over something like this, or that its true masters view this as an unexpected development. Indeed, they have planned for it and are banking on it. Street mobs have been the tool of tyrants Western political history since at least Caesar’s day.
What s new s that there are no antipodes to pack them off to, or frontiers to escape to.
Victor, Tamquam, There are though relatively nice latino areas like Highland Park, where if you are black, you’d best not go. There are many unprovoked brown on black attacks in many latino areas in LA. Just your normal disintegration of the social fabric – nothing to worry about.
Unsk 84. “There are though relatively nice latino areas like Highland Park, where if you are black, you’d best not go. There are many unprovoked brown on black attacks in many latino areas in LA. ”
Another fact I’ve missed! My office is smack dab in the middle of Highland Park, and whereas there are few blacks in the area, they don’t seem to have special problems. In fact, some black families deliberately move out of Watts, South Central, etc. into Hispanic areas because even though the schools are not the best their kids won’t be recruited into gangs and can get a better level of education than they otherwise would. These are folks who have the brains and the drive to break out of Black culture and break the cycle of dependency.
I’m glad that was disputed, because I spent a school vacation in East LA once with a friend and her Mexican parents. It was tough getting on the plane back to Boston. I’ll remember their kindness always, and I worry about them sometimes…
YBR@79: I didn’t intend to limit my reference to the US BK Code to personal bankruptcies (in that I see moral hazard issues in the personal choices made by shareholders and executives of corporations/business entities that also end up making use of the BK Code). But even limited to the context of personal bankruptcies, moral hazard issues may be present in the 40% of personal BK’s that don’t involve medical bills and whatever portion of the 60% that do involve medical bills in which the person in question made a choice to go without insurance or smoked 2 packs a day or whatever.
Clearly, the Bankruptcy Code has a meaningful place in the world, but it would be hard to argue with the notion that in many cases (though certainly not all) it does serve to shield a person (or collection of persons in the case of a company) from the consequences of their actions.
It’s not just the feral, unsocialized, ill-educated youths we have to worry about.
I visited the WaPo today to read a story about the Wisconsin recall elections. One of the commenters, who had what was presumbably his photo posted with his comment made a dark comment about how democracy wasn’t working, and so it’s time to “move on to plan B.” My initial reaction was laughter. The photo shows a guy with a tie on who looks like a younger Steve Colbert with about 50 extra pounds. I was tempted to register with the WaPo just so I could snidely tell the guy that Come the Revolution, he’ll go to loot the local Krispy Kreme and will never come out.
But the more I thought about it, the more weirdly disturbing I found his comment. He looks like any number of young men I’ve worked with over the years. (And of course, he himself may be just blowing a lot of hot air and stupid bravado.) I do wonder though, how many of those outwardly dutiful, smart,young men harbor violent and resentful thoughts because, d*mn it, why are they sitting in cubicles pushing paper? They were told their entire lives they were special snowflakes, but the boss just chewed them out because the sales numbers were down. Capitalism must be bad because it doesn’t recognize their talents, just like the girls in high school didn’t recognize their real worth and went for the jocks instead, those b’s.
I used to think the white guys I occasionally see with Che T-shirts on didn’t have a clue about what Che really did. But some of them do know about Guevara’s murders – and it’s fine by them. Some of them really do want to escape their mundane existence and visualize themselves as the masterminds and generals of an angry rainbow coalition of inner-city minorities, rising up to destroy the corporations, the racist Republicans, the homophobe “Christianists” and all the other baddies on the left-wing hit parade. They aren’t replused by the London riots. They fantasize about being there to lead the charge, about turning that aimless looting and thuggery into something more, er, focused.
Silly and naive? Well, maybe. It’s worth noting that most famous revolutionaries (and many of the most bloodthirsty) come from middle class backgrounds. Also worth noting: in the 19th century, young men with a disdain for the dull and predictable would have gone West. Or (if British), they would have emigrated to Sydney or gone exploring in India or Burma or the Canadian Rockies. Is it entirely concidence that the desire to reshape the world via social engineering took hold as the long Era of Exploration came to an end in the west?
…Unsk, I worked Central L.A. as a cop and our beat went out I-10 to the Evergreen ped. overcrossing. Just short of the Mexican Alps. I was a motorcop and my favorite beat was the Pasadena Fwy. I gotta throw in with Tamquam here. The folks on my beat were …well, just folks. Whether Frogtown off the the Golden State Fwy, or Highland park, or South Pas.,or Pasadena proper, Once you got to know them they were just like you and me, only different. Treating them with dignity and respect ( until they, as individuals, proved that wrong ) went a long way to bridging the language gap. Sure there were gangs, mostly young teens. Dangerous as rattlesnakes but doing what most folks new to weapons and without training do. Screwing up.
“The $64 trillion question is what do we do about it?”
For Britain and the EU, nothing. We should do nothing. They should continue doing what they do. They want the EUSSR because they believe these things are good. I want the EUSSR because someone has to set a bad example and because EU subjects haven’t learned from the last few times socialism ruled EUrope. It’s win-win.
Great Britain has no more right to exist than France or Israel.
I lived in California 10 years, half of it living in Torrance and the rest up north of Santa Barbara. Here is a little incident I heard of that occurred a few years ago.
One Saturday morning at a park located in the “L.A. Strip” – that portion of the city of LA that extends down to Long Beach Harbor – a couple of Hispanic men got into an argument. Each called for reinforcements. When the LA police arrived to break up a reported fight they found themselves facing a impending battle between two mobs. They called for backup.
A few miles to the west, the city of Torrance was holding its annual Armed Forces Day parade. In addition to the bands, marching troops, and a tank or two going down Torrance Blvd, they had a flyover, two F-15E’s from Edwards AFB. The jets overflew the parade area, and then turned around and came down to do a buzz job along the parade route.
The F-15’s flight path took them right over the park where the mobs were about to have at it. Everyone stopped at the noise, looked up, and saw the cops talking on their radios, followed by the jets flying over, zooming up, turning round and coming back, seemingly boring in for the kill.
The crowd dispersed very rapidly.
30. bell curve
The M1A in that scene was absolutely beautiful, but if your position is untenable, the number of fighters you can bring to the fight is “held up” because they don’t know there’s a fight, and your enemy is numerous and has nothing to lose, it’s Tango Uniform.
I’m sensing an analogy and a conundrum, here.
#83 Mongoose – I respectfully disagree. Darwinian selection continues to apply for people. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases the results are ones neither of us approve of.
For someone living in the middle of one of the Abandoned Areas in US or UK cities, the environment is that area and that social milieu. And one of the ways to show fitness in the evolutionary sense is to be completely feckless and irresponsible. The (far too many) gangbangers who have fathered a dozen kids by as many different women are, in fact, fit in a Darwinian sense, in that environment.
The challenge is to stop that being the case. One way to do that is to lock them up until their reproductive years are effectively over. There are others.
One of the most intractable facts – or some might say “one of the most stubborn problems” – is the absolute and ineradicable reflex of all peoples to self-select according to skin color, language, economic / cultural affinities, etc. That ordering becomes variable in the higher-level qualifiers, but it seems to hold true in all societies right up to the present.
Cynical and Realist operators understand this, even if they give lip service to the absurd counter-factual hypotheses of the Marxist / Liberal / Transnational Progressivists. Thus, the offering of an obscure intellectual mediocrity with a tabula rasa for a C/V, whose image and persona were crafted to fulfill the simpering simplicities of a mass of adolescent dreamers who have never been forced to clean up their own messes. They wept for joy, and elected a malevolent cipher as their leader, and still have utterly failed to grasp the enormity of their mistake.
This is because the consequences of that mistake still fully match all the falsities they have accepted as unimpeachable truth from the Socialist liars who have spewn their inverted logic from the front of the classroom, the television sitcoms and news, literature, movies, and the courts for at least three generations.
To believe is praised as the mark of a decent and supremely intelligent person.
To challenge orthodoxy is defined as clear evidence of a greedy, uncouth, selfish, corrupt brute deserving condemnation, shunning, and punishment.
At many levels, it’s hard to find much to foster optimism, except for the very long term.
Prayer to the Almighty seems appropriate.
And preparation for times of tumult.
I wonder what percentage of the London Looters were raised by/with fathers?
The culture is collapsing.
Mr. Fernandez, I greatly identify with your thoughts and web collections on the London riots. I was particularly impressed with your summary of British policing in the last decades.
I view Mr. Dalrymple’s article as a diagnosis, not a prescription. For the prescription is by now bureaucratic. And there Tainter and Olsun are our masters.
In his book titled The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter argues that complex societies collapse because devolving becomes impossible. Those layers of bureaucracy and stratifications of professionals and regulation become such an inflexible warren that unwinding them becomes impossible. Like large bankrupt firms, orderly downsizing is often impossible. The bureaucracy and overhead has devoured the last marginal value and the increased complexity just adds cost. Collapse eventually becomes the only possible avenue to simplify.
And of course there is a cultural component here as well. Can British culture demonstrate the will and determination to withstand the pain that devolvement must entail? Sadly, the riots do not give us much hope.
For Britain in the last decades iconically adopted the post-modernist and Malthusian global warming and class warfare stories of a beseiged planet. How else can one adopt government policies that restrict virtually all construction, job creation and the punishing standard of living costs of alternative energy?
Unfortunately, none of these cultural memes buttress a culture to fight their own decline or bankruptcy. On the contrary, they prepare for it.